Thread: Soy's Passively Cooled Project

Has anyone worked with passive cooling on PC's much?

I have a spare platform laying around now. An M2N32 SLI Deluxe with an Athlon II x4 3.0ghz and 4 gigs of DDR2 800. It has dual 16 SLI lanes. I want to make a passively cooled media center out of it; with the potential for moderate gaming.


I have found GPUs and passive coolers that should work. The GTS 450 is the largest GPU I can find that has a tested passive cooler.
Newegg.com - ARCTIC COOLING ACCEL-S1-PLUS Accelero S1 PLUS VGA Cooler for NVIDIA and AMD Radeon


This is a platinum rated PSU, and the peak draw of two 450's, a 89watt CPU and this mobo add up to maybe 390-400w.
Newegg.com - KINGWIN STR-500 500W ATX 12V v2.2, EPS 12V v2.91 and SSI EPS 12V v2.92 SLI Ready 80 PLUS PLATINUM Certified Modular Active PFC Stryker Fanless Power Supply

I only plan to have a single SSD and a bluray burner in it.

Pretty wooden case to match my TV armoire:
Newegg.com - nMEDIAPC Red Wood Wood/Steel HTPC 8000 ATX Media Center / HTPC Case

Here is my conundrum: All of the CPU coolers I can seem to find on newegg and some other shopping sites that can be used passively are rated for lower wattage CPUs. Does anyone know a good passive solution for a ~90w 3.0ghz quad core Athlon?

Gonna be tough on a 90w part. You could underclock it a bit to see if that helps temps. I use gt430 cards in my HTPC and they play all media just great and fold when they are not in use.

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Even if you get all passively cooled components, you really should have some case air movement... maybe one fan making some form of air movement through the case...

Motherboards and most passively cooled stuff is built to utilize existing air movement, none at all would be an issue.

Originally Posted by rush2049

Even if you get all passively cooled components, you really should have some case air movement... maybe one fan making some form of air movement through the case...

Motherboards and most passively cooled stuff is built to utilize existing air movement, none at all would be an issue.

Yeah, I was considering mounting one noctua 140mm on the exhaust hole... the case is big enough and already has a 140mm mount. It moves like 40cfm at 10.1db.

Originally Posted by HeavyG

Gonna be tough on a 90w part. You could underclock it a bit to see if that helps temps. I use gt430 cards in my HTPC and they play all media just great and fold when they are not in use.

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Yeah I was considering underclocking as a way to use the passive coolers. With four cores even 2.0ghz would be fine for most applications.

not just underclock, undervolt everything. Graphics card, cpu, northbridge.... everything can be undervolted..... some times without the need to underclock.

That is snazzy!!

I was going to suggest that as well. An H60 water cooler for the CPU which, with fan would give that air movement as well mounted to an exhaust hole.

instead of building up this platform (the M2N32...), I am giving it to my brother and relieving him of a A8N SLI Deluxe (I think... socket 939 AMD with SLI x8/x8 DDR1). His CPU is only a 2.2 Ghz Athlon 64. I had an FX-60 but sold it to Deus a few years back. Wish I had it now, it would be perfect ... the wattacge of many 939 CPUs falls well within passive cooling ranges. Looks like I may get to build a dual core SLI media rig that is all passive save a 140mm noctua running at 10db; and if I set it up right it may stay off and just spin up to vent the box every so often. Nice and quiet.